Kunsthaus Bregenz presents Love is Colder than Capital. An Exhibition About the Value of Feelings on view February 2–April 14, 2013.
Love is Colder than Capital, 2013. Installation view, Kunsthaus Bregenz. Photo: Markus Tretter. © The artists and Kunsthaus Bregenz.
The title of the big group exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz Love is Colder than Capital has been filched: it comes from the play of the same name by the controversial post-dramatic stage director René Pollesch, whose works deal with the neoliberal exploitation of the private and the personal by economic interests. More clearly than ever, the progressive dwindling of manufacturing production and the steady rise of service-oriented industries call on the emotional commitment of workers, and make feelings—purportedly genuine or merely feigned—an increasingly integral part of immaterial, commodity-like products.
Emotion, passion, care, even love, are the ostensible themes of this Bregenz exhibition. At the same time, however, this essayistically conceived show never sidesteps the tricky ambiguities of such sympathy-based concepts. One cannot always tell with the exhibited works whether the supposedly romantic idea of “true” love is at stake, or rather a variant “tainted” by economic or other social aspects. At the latest, since the end of the first decade of this century it has become increasingly difficult to draw a line between what is one’s own and personal and what is public.
Against this background and the mutual interdependence of art and society, the exhibition raises questions such as: How do artists address the relation between emotion and economy? How do they reflect the ambivalence of personal and social empathy between the two poles of authenticity and staged seduction?
Many of the installations, objects, and videos were specially created for the exhibition. Major works that are already part of the canon of contemporary art, by Hans Haacke, Isa Genzken, and Cindy Sherman are also on show. Famous works by the legendary New York artist Keith Haring will constitute a historic highlight of the exhibition, works that gave expression to the relations between love, sexuality, and commerce in innovative pictorial compositions way back in the 1980s.
Participating artists: Neil Beloufa, Minerva Cuevas, Mariechen Danz, Isa Genzken, Hans Haacke, Keith Haring, Teresa Margolles, Ken Okiishi, Julika Rudelius, Yorgos Sapountzis, Cindy Sherman, Andreas Siekmann, Dirk Stewen, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Rosemarie Trockel, Cathy Wilkes.
Kunsthaus Bregenz
Karl-Tizian-Platz
6900 Bregenz, Austria
www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at